As universally acclaimed as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 filmic icon is, its “ubiquitous presence has made The Godfather increasingly difficult to see,” writes The Los Angeles Times’ David Ulin. We remember the broad strokes — the horse’s head, the one-liners repeated ad nauseum by the contemporary Corleones on The Sopranos — but what “we forget, though, is the power of the story, a narrative of assimilation and identity and the compromises we make with ourselves.”
In a review last week, Ulin suggests that a new book, The Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2007), by Jenny Jones of the Walker’s Film/Video department, can help us see the film “fresh after all these years.”
Jones, who worked at Oak Street Cinema and Portland’s Northwest Film Center before becoming the program associate for the Walker’s Regis Dialogues and Retrospectives, wrote the book to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the film’s release. And she does unearth some surprising information:
• Twelve directors turned down offers to make the film version of Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, including, at first, the then nearly unknown Coppola, who considered it “sleazy.”
• One of the most quotable lines in the movie, "Leave the gun, take the cannolis," was ad-libbed by actor Richard Castellano.
• Paramount Pictures pushed Puzo to write the original screenplay as a modern story “set in the 1970s, complete with hippies.” When Coppola came on board he dismissed it as “a slick, contemporary gangster picture of no importance. It wasn’t Puzo’s fault. He just did what they told him to do.” It took Coppola and Puzo two more drafts to arrive at the final script, which Jones’ reproduces in full, with notes by Puzo and Coppola scrawled in the margins.
• The “most famous technical mistake of the movie” remained because of budgetary concerns. In it James Caan as the hot-headed Sonny missed a punch during a street fight with his brother-in-law, Carlo. “At that point we were just rushing, and it turned out that the best take had this one miss,” said Coppola. “Today they could fix it with digital effects.”
With more than 200 production photos, interviews with actors and crew members, and details on deleted scenes and bloopers, the book, says Jones, offers a rich look into “a film that continues to captivate us, decades after its release, and appeals to both erudite film buffs and TV couch potatoes alike."
Melody Gilbert has a way of tapping into the zeitgeist. Her film Whole (2003) came out two years before the New York Times reported on a psychological disorder in which people are obsessed with having limbs amputated. Her newest film, Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness, delves into a culture I began noticing relatively recently: the clandestine and usually illegal exploration of deteriorating or forgotten elements of urban history, from abandoned factories to underground sewer tunnels. Inspired by a 2003 news report about the arrest of six local people who were mistaken for terrorists because of their night-vision goggles, rappelling equipment, and gasmasks, she set out to document this largely hidden endeavor (what one critic calls “tresspassing as hobby”), travelling from Minneapolis to Paris and beyond. Since then UE has blossomed with countless videos, blogs, clubs, meetups, and webrings dedicated to it.
The film gets its world premiere here as part of Women With Vision (through March 17) Friday and Saturday. Director Melody Gilbert will introduce the screenings.
See if you agree with this: a panel of experts–Peter Bradshaw, Xan Brooks, Molly Haskell, Derek Malcolm, Andrew Pulver, B Ruby Rich and Steve Rose–convened on the Guardian’s behalf to select the “40 best directors.” Using a 20-point scale, with 20 the best, they graded each artist’s substance, look, craft, orginality, and intelligence. While Walker film audiences should recognize plenty of names, there are some surprises: no Coppola, Kurosawa, Kubrick, or Hitchcock (hmm, while it doesn’t say so, this appears to be a list of living directors.)
And the winners are (in suspense-enhancing order):
40. Gus Van Sant
39. David Fincher
38. Takashi Miike
37. Lars von Trier
35. Larry and Andy Wachowski
34. David O. Russell
33. Pavel Pawlikowski
32. Gaspar Noe
31. Richard Linklater
30. Takeshi Kitano
29. Wes Anderson
28. Michael Moore
27. Ang Lee
25. Spike Jonze
24. Alexander Payne
23. Walter Salles
22. Michael Haneke
21. Paul Thomas Anderson
20. Michael Winterbottom
19. Aki Kaurismaki
18. Tsai Ming Liang
17. Quentin Tarantino
16. Todd Haynes
15. Pedro Almodovar
14. Wong Kar-wai
13. Bela Tarr
12. Lynne Ramsay
11. Lukas Moodysson
10. Terence Davies
8. Hayao Miyazaki
5. Terrence Malick
4. Steven Soderbergh
3. Joel and Ethan Coen
2. Martin Scorsese
1. David Lynch
Jesus Camp, the film about a now-closed “Kids on Fire” bible camp by documentarians Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (whose Boys of Baraka showed here at Women with Vision 2006), keeps racking up awards like the Special Documentary Jury Prize at Tribeca and the Sterling Award at SilverDocs. Now you can watch the entire film at GoogleVideo.
Via Digg.
Known for films that combine street footage with elements of documenary, narrative, and experimental approaches, Jem Cohen’s filmography includes the documentaries Instrument (1999), made with and about the band Fugazi, and Benjamin Smoke (2000), among others. Coming to the Walker April 27 for a dialogue with musician Vic Chesnutt, Cohen discussed his first narrative feature film, Chain (which screens here on April 26) with Dean Otto, assistant film/video curator. For the work, he converted the non-narrative three-screen installation Chain X 3, featuring endless footage of chain stores, fast-food restaurants, and suburban parking lots, into a fictional feature on the same themes but using character actors. In this excerpt of their interview (full interview here), Cohen discusses how footage he habitually shoots whenever he travels coalesced into a refined film concept.
Dean Otto: At what point did you realize that project was the one you would be working on with that footage?
Jem Cohen: Well, I think it came out of my work doing city portraits--places that had a regional character that was strong, but endangered. So I was often having to frame things out: a billboard or a new skyscraper or a franchise hotel or a mall encroaching on some extraordinary neighborhood. I'd be shooting a beautiful street in Prague in the middle of the night and I would have my back to the new McDonalds that was ruining the view in that direction. After contending with that, often by documenting the very thing that was disappearing, I began to feel that I had some kind of obligation to deal with this new world and to face these issues head on. I forced myself to put those things that I had long avoided square into the center of the frame and to examine the changes.
DO: It's very poignant that you're presenting this work here because the first indoor mall in America was Southdale in Edina, Minnesota. With the explosion in the number of corporate mergers, it seems as if a small number of corporations are dictating architecture through branding and franchising, and there is a real comfort that people feel through corporate identity.
JC: That's an integral part of the project: it isn't about any one thing, but that is as important as any other theme in there. Corporations are faced with this endless, brutal game of trying to create the impression of novelty while really destroying difference. It's kind of devastating, but it's really important that we take a closer look at it. I can't believe I came to the Midwest and didn't get out to the Mall of America--the über mall.
Earlier: Jem Cohen’s run-in with Homeland Security!
In an ongoing series of interviews with Sundance participants, indieWIRE interviews filmmaker Alan Berliner. A past Walker artist-in-residence, Berliner is introducing his new documentary, Wide Awake. Like the film he screened here, The Sweetest Sound (an obsessive history of naming and, specifically, his own name), this new effort is autobiographical. Only this time it’s about sleep:
Where did the initial idea for your film come from?
I’ve been a poor sleeper my entire life but wasn’t ready to tackle the problem in a film until now. I’m not sure if it had to do with marrying Shari, with having a child, or the fact that my last film “The Sweetest Sound” (a film about “names”) explored “identity” from the outside (looking in), so to speak — that I felt I needed to explore “identity” from the inside (looking out) this time. I’ve known all along that my insomnia is caused by my inability to shut down my brain at night. Making “Wide Awake” allowed me to dive head first into the problem — directly into my thought process, both conscious and unconscious - into the very place that provides fuel for my creative life, but paradoxically, also keeps me up at night and makes me exhausted during the day. I wanted to understand the source and seed of some of my deepest conflicts and contradictions and try to render them in ways both visceral and poetic. And cinematic.
At the same time, I want the film to generate a greater understanding of and empathy with the condition of sleeplessness — at both the personal and societal levels. There’s also a good deal of practical advice in the film that can help others with sleep problems as well.
See documentation of Berliner’s installation, exhibition, and film screenings for The Language of Names, or try out the interactive naming tools developed during his residency here (see how popular your name is, read stories about how people got their names, and more).
In inner-city Baltimore, 76 percent of African-American boys don’t graduate from high school. And, as the school system complained to the president of a philanthropic foundation five years ago, five percent of troublemakers were making learning nearly impossible for the other 95 percent. The solution they came up with was Baraka School, an experimental school in Kenya–yes, Africa–where “at-risk” kids are shipped to get a radical education away from the influences of drugs, violence, and poverty. In the east African language Kiswahili, “baraka” means blessing, and for some of the boys featured in the new documentary Boys of Baraka, it seems a fitting name. Shot over three years, the film focuses on a handful of boys as they face loneliness, discipline, and catharses in Kenya:
Devon, now 15 and a ninth grader at the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, recalls a moment that changed him. After he deliberately bumped a teacher, two counselors took him for a “night walk,” far from campus, and left him to find his way back. The chattering of baboons filled the dark skies. “Tears were running down my cheeks,” he says. “That was a lot more scary than Baltimore. I was walking all by myself, thinking about everything [my grandmother and teachers] always told me about doing good. I wasn’t so tough. That was when I started to listen.” Richard struggles with his reading — “something wrong with my brain,” he says with a laugh — but one night, to grand applause, he shares a poem he has written. The title: “I Will Survive.” Devon and Romesh make the honor roll, and Montrey, by now reading books on his own for the first time, earns 95s. “Before Baraka, I always failed math,” says Montrey, now 15 and a Baltimore City College freshman. “I never went [to class]. With all those teachers coming after me, I learned to value my education.”
The Boys of Baraka screens at the Walker on March 16 as part of the 2006 Women with Vision festival of film and video. Watch the trailer here. To hear this morning’s review on NPR by Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, click here. Look for more Women with Vision preview posts in weeks to come…
In October 2002, artist-in-residence Wang Jian Wei brought to Minneapolis the ingredients for a classic Szechwan dish, Ma Po Tofu. Exploring the cultural differences in the experience of food as it travels around the world, he prepared the dish from his home province beside a local chef who created the American version. Called Moveable Taste, the performance encouraged the audience to sample both versions to discover the differences. On December 20, 2005, Wang revisted the experience by inviting film curator Sheryl Mousley to taste the same dish at a restaurant in Beijing. Mousley was in Beijing to meet with Chinese filmmakers and prepare a new residency project with Wang Jian Wei.
Plot summary, title, marketing angle, all rolled into one: that’s the brilliance of the title of Samuel L. Jackson’s upcoming film.
(Thanks, Dean.)
Ang Lee will have something to talk about at tonight’s sold-out Regis Dialogue with James Schamus: Brokeback Mountain was nominated seven times for the Golden Globes this morning. Here’s the rundown: Best Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor (Heath Ledger), Best Supporting Actress (Michelle Williams), Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. Also of note: two films presented in October as part of the Walker’s First Look series were nominated. George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck received four, and Paradise Now was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which made its sold-out Minneapolis debut at the Walker last night, is raking in just about every major film award, from a Golden Lion for Best Film at Venice to film-of-the-year honors from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and when Golden Globe nominees are announced tomorrow morning, it’s expected to be a frontrunner. Minneapolis audiences seem to have their finger on the pulse: tickets to tomorrow night’s Regis Dialogue with Lee and longtime collaborator James Schamus have been sold out for two months already.
(Film curator Sheryl Mousley reports that several men showed up in cowboy gear last night. They all found seats in the back, a courtesy, apparently, to those who might’ve ended up seated right behind their ten-gallon hats. Rumor is that, because of the timing of our dialogue/retrospective and the Golden Globes announcement, Schamus and Lee may be fielding questions from international reporters right here tomorrow.)
The original: The New Yorker has published Annie Proulx’s original short story of “Brokeback Mountain,” and here’s a discussion on adapting it to a screenplay.
Is Star Wars the greatest postmodern film ever? Aidan Wasley at Slate seems to think so. He writes:
Star Wars, at its secret, spiky intellectual heart, has more in common with films like Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books or even Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle than with the countless cartoon blockbusters it spawned. Greenaway and Barney take the construction of their own work as a principal artistic subject, and Lucas does, too. “This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level,” one of John Ashbery’s works begins. Star Wars, we might say, is concerned with plot on a very plain level. Everything about the films, from the opening text crawls to the out-of-order production of the two trilogies, foregrounds the question of plot. As an audience, we grapple with not just the intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself.
Agree? Disagree? Discuss (ahem, there is a comment function).
Via Greg.org, where you can also find musings on watching all five Cremaster films in order, including:
Best overheard comment after Cremaster 1, when a guy at a suddenly partially visible urinal complained that the mens room door was being propped open by the line: “We just spent 45 minutes in someone’s ovaries. I’m sure no one cares about seeing you take a piss.”
The Globe and Mail confirms that filmmaker David Cronenberg will be “co-curating” the Canadian appearance of ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964. The first Warhol show organized by the Walker, it opens in Minneapolis November 13 with 20 photo-silkscreens featuring images pulled from mass-media of Warhol’s day: tabloids, newspapers, and LIFE magazine. What distinguishes it from other Warhol shows is the inclusion of darker imagery--electric chairs, gory car wrecks, and civil rights marchers attacked by police dogs--amid portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. Which is maybe why Cronenberg is a fitting pick for its showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario next July: his last film was A History of Violence. In preparation for his work, he traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to view some of the artist’s early films, including Sleep (which will be included in the Walker film series Factory Films, January 15-26). The exhibition was curated by former Walker curator Douglas Fogle, now curating the Carnegie International.
This morning’s New York Times highlights an innovation in film distribution, IndieFlix.com: independent filmmakers, at no risk, can submit their work to a website where visitors can log in and browse a catalogue of films, select which ones they like, and get a freshly burned DVD version mailed to them. And it’s cheap: $9.95 for a feature-length film. Just prove you’re not infringing anyone’s copyright, and you can distribute your work, without having to produce or store inventory.
It’s another development that seems to bode well for filmmakers working geographically or thematically outside Hollywood’s sphere. Not only are DV cameras and editing software becoming more affordable, but demand for content is on its way up. Film Threat cites the release of the video iPod, the rise of videoblogging, and the recent acquisition of iFilm.com by MTV to back up that claim. And with popular, new peer-to-peer filesharing protocols like BitTorrent, maybe there’s hope for the continued health of truly independent cinema.
Cause and effect factors heavily into Hubert Sauper’s new documentary Darwin’s Nightmare (screening tomorrow through Sunday at the Walker Cinema), all the way down to its conception. In 1997 while working on the film Kisangani Diary, which tracked the plight of Rwandan refugees during the Congolese rebellion, he noticed an odd juxtaposition, two planes carrying very different cargos. One, coming in, was loaded with 45 tons of yellow peas, sent from the US to feed refugees in UN camps. The other, departing the Congo, was filled with 50 tons of filleted fish heading to markets in wealthy European countries. “But soon it turned out that the rescue planes with yellow peas also carried arms to the same destinations,” he writes, “so that the same refugees that were benefiting from the yellow peas could be shot at later during the nights.”
This effect had an unlikely cause: as an experiment in the ’60s, Nile perch were introduced into Tanzania’s Lake Victoria and wiped out local fish populations. While people living near the lake languished on the brink of starvation, a booming export market for the fish emerged, bringing with it the byproducts of globalization--factories, guns, and corrupt trade officials. Sauper writes, “I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this ‘fittest’ animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil.” The winner of more than a dozen film prizes, including the 2004 European Film Award for Best Documentary, Darwin’s Nightmare was praised by New York Times critic A.O. Scott as “an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.”
Now, if that all sounds too depressing, here’s something to cheer you up: We’re giving away five pairs of tickets to screenings of Darwin’s Nightmare. Just be among the first five people to email Joe Beres in the Walker Film/Video department (please mention which screening you’d like to see). View dates and times--or for those of you who are too slow, buy tickets--here.
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